Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On 22 Sep, 17:20, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 4:14 AM, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: On 21 Sep, 18:10, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: What is the significance of intelligence in a universe with deterministic laws? Your performance on any IQ test is not due to your possessing some property called intelligence, but rather is an inevitable outcome of the universe's initial conditions and governing causal laws. it is of course both I guess I'd have to hear your definition of property to make any sense of that. In what sense is it like the properties of charge, mass, spin, or color? it's a distinguishing characteristic that is detectable And in what sense is it different? it's not physically basic Solving a problem correctly is no more impressive or significant than rain falling correctly. You answer the question in the only way the deterministic laws allow. The rain falls in the only way that the deterministic laws allow. so your actual conclusion is not that intelligence isn't intelligence, but that intelligence isn't an achivement No, my actual conclusion is the part where I conclude: The word 'intelligence' doesn't refer to anything except the experiential requirements that the universe places on you as a consequence of its causal structure. I have no idea what that means -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
RE: What's wrong with this?
Hi Bruno, Thank you for your kind considerations and comments. I will interleave my replies below. From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 10:44 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: What's wrong with this? Hi Stephen, The 1004 fallacy is when people argue, generally on vocabulary, by demanding precision which is actually not relevant with the concerned issue. It come from a passage of Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll. Bruno was looking at a flock of sheep. Sylvie asked how many sheep there are, and Bruno answered about 1004. Sylvie said that about contradicts the four in 1004, and that he should have said about 1000. To say about 1004 is what I like to call the 1004 fallacy. It is very common in some kind of pseudo human science, and is akin to jargon. (Of course Bruno likes to have the last word, and justified his 1004 by saying he was sure about the 4, given that he distinctly see four sheep here and there, and that the about applied to the 1000 which could have been 100 or 1 (something like that). [SPK] Ah! I understand and I beg your indulgence on that point. I am trying to communicate an idea for which I do not yet have a precise and well-formed symbolic representation and thus am throwing a lot of notions your way hoping that you might intuit a rough version of the idea and ignore the extraneous noise. I am using several ideas that are similar, within my understanding, to several ideas that are present in mathematics and logics and so I beg your indulgence. [BM] Now I do have that feeling a bit with your last posts, where you refer to hard technical works when at the same time I have some difficulties to understand your position (just to make sense of it). [SPK] Yes, we are coming from differing backgrounds and learning and thinking styles. My position is to look at interactions and the implications of such as a possible source and origin for notions that have been usually assumed and even postulated to be primitive and fundamental, but I am also aware that my ideas are a bit divergent of the kinds of things that you are focused upon. As I understand your work so far, you are building a model of the internal and grundladen structure that is an alternative to the diffuse and sometimes naïve metamathematical and metaphysical underpinnings of current physics and that model seems to focus on a single and static entity. I am focused on the external and interactive aspects that highlight many entities in an ongoing and even eternal dialogue with each other. [BM] I think that you try to defend the idea that time is fundamental. Now do you mean some physical notion of time, or do you mean the first person feeling of duration? [SPK] No, time is not fundamental as I understand it. I am advancing and defending the idea that Change is fundamental; time is merely a particular measure of such within finite perception and interactions. I try to go further and advance the idea that we can recover the usual notions of substance and being in terms of isomorphisms within this underlying and fundamental Change. This is done from a Hereclitian perspective informed by the ideas of Plato and others, the latter of which focused upon Being and changelessness as fundamental. I see in most logics and mathematics a tacit axiom of changelessness and I understand the reasoning for such. Truth must be an invariant, but such invariance, I argue, does not necessitate that changelessness be fundamental and primitive. Thus I bet on Arithmetic Realism as True but point out that there is more involved that cannot be captured only within the framework of AR + digital substitution. I argue that we need to have a place within our models for interaction and time, even if that notion of time is emergent and not fundamental. I take duration to be a 1st person aspect that is part of what generates an emergent notion of 3rd person duration for many, such that an appearance of an evolving Common universe obtains. My argument on this are based on my study of computational complexity, concurrency and intractability issues that I found in many philosophical systems. I found that Leibniz' Monadology offered the best framework to explain my reasoning and possible solution. I see your work on modal logics as part of the structure of a Monad, aspects that even Leibniz did not consider and thus am very eager to understand the subtle points of your model. [BM] Are you aware that in both case you have to abandon the mechanist hypothesis, because the digital mechanist hypothesis makes the ultimate reality undistinguishable with arithmetical truth (which is something atemporal/aspatial). In the first case you introduce some physicalism, and in the second case you make consciousness primitive, like
Re: Intelligence and Nomologicalism
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 12:12 PM, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote: On 22 Sep, 17:20, Rex Allen rexallen31...@gmail.com wrote: I guess I'd have to hear your definition of property to make any sense of that. In what sense is it like the properties of charge, mass, spin, or color? it's a distinguishing characteristic that is detectable So your position is that there is an algorithm that would correctly detect all instances of intelligence with no false positives? If you possessed this algorithm, I could present you with a large cube of metal, silicon, and flashing lights, you could apply your algorithm to determine for certain whether any form of artificial intelligence was instantiated by the cube? No matter how obfuscated, encrypted, or abstract the representation used to instantiate the AI? This would be in contradiction to Hilary Putnam's work: Putnam's proposal, and its historical importance, was analyzed in detail in Piccinini forthcoming b. According to Putnam (1960, 1967, 1988), a system is a computing mechanism if and only if there is a mapping between a computational description and a physical description of the system. By computational description, Putnam means a formal description of the kind used in computability theory, such as a Turing Machine or a finite state automaton. Putnam puts no constraints on how to find the mapping between the computational and the physical description, allowing any computationally identified state to map onto any physically identified state. It is well known that Putnam's account entails that most physical systems implement most computations. This consequence of Putnam's proposal has been explicitly derived by Putnam (1988, pp. 95-96, 121-125) and Searle (1992, chap. 9). Or, as Hans Moravec puts it: What does it mean for a process to implement, or encode, a simulation? Something is palpably an encoding if there is a way of decoding or translating it into a recognizable form. Programs that produce pictures of evolving cloud cover from weather simulations, or cockpit views from flight simulations, are examples of such decodings. As the relationship between the elements inside the simulator and the external representation becomes more complicated, the decoding process may become impractically expensive. Yet there is no obvious cutoff point. A translation that is impractical today may be possible tomorrow given more powerful computers, some yet undiscovered mathematical approach, or perhaps an alien translator. Like people who dismiss speech and signs in unfamiliar foreign languages as meaningless gibberish, we are likely to be rudely surprised if we dismiss possible interpretations simply because we can't achieve them at the moment. Why not accept all mathematically possible decodings, regardless of present or future practicality? This seems a safe, open-minded approach, but it leads into strange territory. Where do you think that Putnam and Moravec went wrong? And in what sense is it different? it's not physically basic Then what is it? In what sense does it exist, if not physically? Solving a problem correctly is no more impressive or significant than rain falling correctly. You answer the question in the only way the deterministic laws allow. The rain falls in the only way that the deterministic laws allow. so your actual conclusion is not that intelligence isn't intelligence, but that intelligence isn't an achivement No, my actual conclusion is the part where I conclude: The word 'intelligence' doesn't refer to anything except the experiential requirements that the universe places on you as a consequence of its causal structure. I have no idea what that means Okay, so here's a definition of intelligence from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests) But what is an ability in a deterministic universe? For any given input, a deterministic system can only react in one way. If you expose a deterministic system to a set of inputs that represent a particular environment, the system will react in the one and only way it can to that set of inputs. Knowledge is just the internal state of the deterministic system. This is true of a human. This is true of a bacterium. This is true of a Roomba vacuum cleaner. This is true of a hurricane. This is true of a rock. And, as I pointed out in the original post, probabilistic systems are no better. Intelligence is an arbitrary criterion based only on how things seem to you, and which has no other basis in how things are. So, that is what I mean by: The word 'intelligence' doesn't refer to anything except the experiential requirements that the universe places on you as a consequence of its causal structure. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to
